You are hereby notified that your rights in relation to the contents of your profile will not in any way be legally changed from the agreement under which you signed up by any posting you put in text or otherwise form in your timeline.

The contents of a profile hosted for public display by a company you have no shares in, or ownership of, are very much exploitable by that company, so long as you choose to share publicly using that company’s resources.

With that in mind, you possibly have a right of recourse under UCC 1-103 1-308, which is currently being widely quoted as applicable, however you would have to be prepared to test that in a court of law for it to be in any way effective. Many wise scholars have written on the effectiveness on quoting this code against a vast range of ailments.

I would recommend if you cannot abide by Facebooks TOS, don’t participate. For myself, I welcome my private information-corrupting overlords. Brand me, baby!

Some float up to the top at night, and I read who lied.

I woke early this morning. I have read friends’ blogs and noted that it is #blogjune so am showing support by giving them more to read.

I’m smiling at that last joke. I sometimes think that my humour and love of wordplay was somehow developed by my solitary nature – that I had to come up with ideas that amused me even though I came up with them.

I believe words have power, too – another reason I joke. I’m learning lately how to be more clear when I am serious. Some use the “safe” channel of shared humour to deliver hidden barbs and set downs. A clear categorical denial is a wondrous thing.

These are my thoughts pre rising. I ponder language and myself, and rehearse social strategies. Not much has changed about me.

Distillation is a simple process, yet hard to get entirely right. In the creation of an essence, a purer, finer thing, little imbalances can cause a souring. A little too much heat and a burnt, bitter flavour comes creeping in.

So it was in the family I grew up in. My brother and I were both driven to excel – each of us in differing areas of music, he in sport and myself academically. My childhood was in many ways a vast sequence of delight, constantly being given the tools to discover and explore new knowledge.

Then there’s that heat. I’m not going to play the blame game – I love my parents and I know the wanted, and tried the best. But oh, those distilled essences. Add a little too much C2H6OH to the equation to the point where social lubrication exceeds its capacity and turns to social friction, and the finely tuned learning experiments went a little awry. Both my brother and I are extremely bitter and generously tempered when in negative spaces. His sporting orientation tends to produce physical responses complimentary to my intellectualising. Suffice to say that he and I both have to work on our anger, in differing ways.

Tempering creates balanced internal stresses which cause the glass, when broken, to crumble into small granular chunks instead of splintering into jagged shards. The granular chunks are less likely to cause injury.

I think I’m close enough to the end of the month to examine some of the benefits of this exercise for me, and I’m doing this before an INSANELY busy week happens.

Rather than faffing about with French baked objects I’ve used my tagcloud as an aide-memoire. This would be a different post had Helensville an authentic boulangerie, or had I gone to music practice at the Alliance Francaise last night (I didn’t) and asked them to recommend a late-night boulangerie in the central city area (I also didn’t). So what learning have I encountered?

Themes.

I reminded myself further that I’m simply not into themes. I wouldn’t describe myself as incapable of them; certainly when writing some kind of memo, email or otherwise for work I stick very much to the point.

I started by declaring this the “month of superlatives”. It has only been so in that it’s been one of the bloggingest months of my life and the failingest theme this month on banjosinthestacks. I sometimes had similar levels of activity during the height of my engagement with livejournal, but not usually with a theme.*

I’ve also discussed this with other children’s librarians in relation to themes in programmes. One friend suggested that I “was the theme” in my storytime sessions. As much as a complement as that is, I think it’s overhyping my abilities, or at least misreading where they lie. I do engage well with young children, but my programmes are ultra-structured – I’ll have the same games and songs in the same order every time with differing books. This allows me to modify – pull elements in and out – in response to my energies, and the energies of the children on the day without having to have a think. I achieve infinite variety in the songs and games because I ask the children for elements such as the animals for “Old MacDonald”. I also pursue other themes, such as sharing joy, creativity, support, love and humour through modelled behaviours. Oh all right, and love of reading is in there too. It should be implicit.

So I don’t so much fail at theme as have more investment in structure, tone, style and participation as creating continuity between differing elements.

It is possible.

The same as I don’t see a point in theming, I don’t see a point, other than an exercise, in blogging every single day. As opinionated as I am I don’t feel a wish to find something to express a well thought-out, edited opinion every day. That being said, at this end of the month I have found that when I do blog, I prefer to do that editing and thinking rather than do “something quick”. Even yesterday’s dinner break post, one of my quicker that wasn’t just complaining, had two days of distributed discussion and occasional pondering behind it.

My shortest one I didn’t publicise except through RSS, which I acknowledged in the post. This in itself sparked a fun discussion.

Creative activity enhances wellbeing.

Readers who have been following for a while will have seen mention of insomnia. I tend to have this when I’ve a lot to think about, although this tends to be abstract topics such as “what are some useful models and modes of thought which can support engaged information literacy” and “if I listen to my new song fifity times in my head with my fingers twitching that’s the same as practicing it” rather than “the big boy next door called me names”. In fact I get on with Brett, my large and tough next door neighbour, rather well.

In the past I’ve tended to avoid engaging in writing about these topics or developing musical ideas at times when I should be sleeping because I haven’t wished to stimulate myself further. This month has convincingly demonstrated to me that fully engaging my creative faculties leads to better managed sleep patterns.

I can talk about information profession things.

While I am linked to a small handful of active projects at work presently, my main role right now is to explore and propose a definition and related useful functions for my role, knowing that other related roles and functions may or may not be changing.

A necessary process at for success in this task is the active avoidance of prejudicing the views of people one is seeking input from. Admittedly this is impossible – in an organisation of capable people, nuances are as deftly derived from what isn’t said as what is said.

This isn’t to mention time factors. To speak to an informed and representative sample of an organisation, individual conversations must be limited. Interesting and compelling topics must be touched on then left aside for progress in the key tasks at hand to be made.

So, getting a place to talk about the information profession, the theory that surrounds it and the wonderful culture that springs forth from it is a good thing.

So what?

So I’ll keep on letting structural and stylistic approaches serve as my themes and not worry about it. I’ll stop worrying that creative activity is something I risk using up, although I won’t blog every day. I think now that I’ve cleared a regular window in which writing happens I’ll allow some of that to happen in blog form, and some of that to happen in the many other writing projects I’ve got sitting round on scraps of paper and in little files.

I’ll not only continue to share my infoculture thoughts, I’ve got some new people whose thoughts stimulate to share with to add to the wonderful, but less new, people. *waves*

I’m feeling ripped off. I head a productive and enjoyable day, a healthy walk at luncthimes, good conversations throughout, modest meals but enjoyable meals and my last coffee at 12pm.

I still can’t sleep. Still, I did have excellent sleep the rest of the week. Improvement is improvement, which makes my second deliberate tautology in a learning situation to day. You gets the cheap laffs where you can.

Also: I’m going to use the excess mental energy from my insomnia to write raps, then sleep the sleep of the pious. After that it’s Friday, Friday and then I’ll be singing the Weekend Song (C) me and my homeslice.